“Maybe this is your chance,” John said.
“Chance for what?”
“To make amends. Your mother is not going to be around forever.”
Now she was irritated. She didn’t want to think about her mother’s death. And she didn’t want to think that not only had her mother been raped, but there had been a child. And the child had been taken from her. It just got worse. “Is this walk making you feel better?” Louise asked. “Because it’s not for me.”
“Don’t get cranky on me,” John said.
He looked up and down the street. Still holding hands, they scurried across to their house.
Inside, John told Louise not to think about it anymore that night.
“I’m going to bed. Are you coming?” he said.
“Soon. I need to tend to the birds.”
Louise nestled her extended finger at the base of the bird’s chest. Its cool grey fingers curled around her own. She withdrew her hand from the cage, brought the turquoise budgie to her mouth, and kissed its beak. “Hey, Buddy. How are you? Need some fresh seed?” The bird, with the slightest movement of its crusty beak and knobby grey tongue, nibbled at Louise’s upper lip. Louise stroked the bird’s chest. “Such a pretty boy.” She placed her hand on her shoulder and the bird hopped on. She removed the water tube and feed dishes from the cage.
She worried about Alice. Although her anger came forth readily, her daughter wasn’t inclined to speak of her sadness or fears. There had been an incident in high school. Alice’s reaction had been over the top. Louise didn’t know what to do with her. A high school friend, the two had been inseparable, had died from a rare cancer. Alice had refused to go to school. She spent hours riding her bike around the neighbourhood, and when she wasn’t doing that, she made paper airplanes and threw them into the door, the wall, the big maple in the backyard. Hundreds of crashed planes. Then she made a fire and burned them all. Louise wanted Alice to go to the doctor, but Alice refused. “How can a doctor help?” she’d shouted at Louise. “Doctors couldn’t save Emma.”
Finally, it had been Elinor who was able to soothe Alice. She told her that Emma would always be nearby. That she must listen for her in the wind, in the rivers, and call to her in the stars.
Louise wanted the news about Elinor’s child to be a figment of her mother’s imagination. However, she did know those kind of things happened. She’d had her own experience. She refused to think about that now.
That her mother had gone to Alice was hurtful, but she knew why. Her mother thought Louise wouldn’t believe her, that she would do nothing.
She spilled yellow seed into the bird’s dish, filled the tube with water, and clamped it back on the side of the cage. She needed to make notes, see things in front of her. She grabbed a pad of paper and sat at the table.
The man who raped Elinor. Who was he? Did he have relatives he might have told about the baby?
Teachers, priests, nuns, the cook, the gardener, anyone who worked at the school. DEAD. But had they left stories, secrets with relatives, friends?
Get church records. Lists of students at the school.
Access fed gov’t records for Indian Affairs.
Vital statistics. Provincial registry of births and deaths.
It would take months to follow up on these options.
She could run ads in some newspapers. But she had no name for the child. Alice said her mother called her Bright Eyes, but that wouldn’t be the name the woman had gone by. She jotted down a draft: Saskatchewan Indian woman seeks child, a girl, who was taken from her as an infant. Child was born in residential school in southern Saskatchewan in the early 1890s. Anyone who attended the school, who was involved with or worked at the school, who is related to people from that school. Anyone with any information at all, please contact Louise Preston at …
She slapped the table. Who was she fooling? No one would come forward. No one would give a damn about an Indian baby. She scribbled out what she had written. She would have to find other ways.
Her mother had never, ever spoken about her time in residential school. Had others? She didn’t know. She and her mother were not so different. Neither had wanted to talk about certain things in their past. Louise didn’t have the fond memories of high school that John had. Or that her own children had.
She drew the cover over the birdcage, wished the birds a goodnight. Elinor hated that Louise kept birds in a cage. Louise had found her mother with the cage door open, encouraging the birds to come out. They needed to fly, she argued, even if it was only around the kitchen.
The screen door squeaked as she pulled it open. The sound seemed louder in the darkness, the quiet still of midnight. Moving slowly, picking her way down the steps, then along the garden path, she marvelled that her mother, whom she’d always known to be a purveyor of truth and honesty, had kept this secret for so many decades. How had she managed? What had kept her from speaking out?
Oh, Louise, stop being a ninny. She spoke into the darkness. You know how it’s done. She had her own secret that she’d kept for her entire life. A secret she intended never to speak of.
Even though in her work she pursued the truth, truth in the service of justice, she was convinced that everyone lied, everyone kept secrets. Ministers, priests, judges, plumbers, and teachers. Shopkeepers, bus drivers, and politicians. Young children, teenagers, grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins. It was a given. Everyone had a secret. Dogs hid their bones, squirrels buried their nuts. Birds tucked away treasures. The issue was not that people lied and kept confidences. What was more interesting to Louise was why people gave up their secrets. That was her job as a lawyer — to find out how to unlock the vault of secrets of the accused. Or her own client. To find the key to the vault.
Thin clouds slithered over the half-full moon. A dog a few blocks away barked into the advancing night. More clouds, more darkness, save a shard of white light along the fence from the street light. She’d try. She’d try damned hard to find this child. But she was not hopeful.
8
Leaning heavily on the white hickory stick Alice had given her when her arthritis got bad, Elinor crept outside. The last time she’d gone without the cane, she’d fallen. Her left hip and thigh had swollen up like a melon; the bruised area had been a palette of colour, first the deep purple-blue of a plum and then the white-violet of a grape’s interior. Only when the pale yellow came did she know her body had almost completed its repairs.
A breeze off the waters, pregnant with autumnal moistness, wrapped itself around her. She wished River a good day and gave thanks to the Creator for the clear waters, the fishes and ducks that it nurtured. River was so much older than she, yet he continued his smooth movements without the need of a cane. She thanked the valley for its unchanging beauty. Even with her eyes closed, she knew the forms that were there. Just as her fingers knew, and would always know, the softness of the skin of her babies.
She inched across the front of her yard.
In her worst moments, she thought it was entirely her fault that Louise had shunned all that was Indian. Louise being the oldest, although not her first-born (too many babies had been lost before her), she had borne the brunt of Elinor’s unhappiness and the malaise of their people that followed so many years in that place, that kiskinwahâmêtowikamik. She could still see that teacher, his face uglier than a badger’s. Fat purple lips, crooked teeth, eyebrows and moustache wilder than the wind. She had never forgotten those nights he’d taken her to the principal’s office. No one knew how he crawled over her body, pushing himself inside her until she thought her heart would be shoved out of her mouth.
Mihkominak. Mihkominak. Red berries. Red berries.
She’d say the words over and over and over. Until he left. Until her breathing slowed. Until her heart stopped racing.
She gripped the fork handle, steadied herself, and pushed the tool into the earth. The fork slipped easily into the sandy soil. She loved her garden. Clumps of earth crumbling int
o her palm, silken soil slipping through her fingers. The joy of discovering one morning that the earth had given birth, uppity shoots of onion, soft hairs of carrot, bold leaves of bean and pea. She supposed she could thank that school for teaching her how to garden; that was not something her mother would have shown her. In the summers when she was home with her parents, the stench of his mouth, the weight of his body surged into her mind. Some nights it was if he was there in the bed with her. She’d shove the pillow into her mouth to silence her weeping.
She lifted another clod of earth, heavier than the previous perhaps, and within seconds of doing so, the difficulty breathing and light-headedness came. She willed her body to the bent willow chair on the edge of the garden.
When her breathing had steadied she took the slim blue metal case and the box of wooden matches from the pocket of her sweater. She struggled to pry open the metal box; some days her hands worked like a dog’s paws. Finally the lid came free and she took out a cigarette.
Roll-your-owns, that’s all she’d ever smoked. She hated filters. The tobacco in the uncut stuff was fresher. Her withered lips held a trembling pucker around the thin cigarette. She fumbled to get hold of a match. Finally, the long flame bit at the twisted paper end. She smoked only outside; if she nodded off in the garden there was only herself to be burned down. A strand of smoke swirled before her then drifted upward. She leaned back into her chair. She still enjoyed a good smoke. That would be another problem with moving in with her daughter or taking an apartment in the city — she wouldn’t have Jeremy to roll smokes for her. Every few days he’d come by, check her supply, then roll ten or fifteen. He told her to call him when she needed more, but she’d never had to; he always showed up when there were only two or three left. She took a couple of short puffs. If Louise was there she’d be rolling her eyes. At least she’d stopped giving her the speech about smoking being bad for her health. She wondered what her daughter and granddaughter were doing to find Bright Eyes. Five days. That’s how long it had been since she told Alice. Louise was coming to see her in a day or two.
A twig snapped. Then short, quick blasts of breath. She stilled herself. There was no need to turn; he was beside her, and if she chose to, she could touch the muscled flank, stroke the soft ear.
“You’ve been away,” she said. “You had me worried. Other gardens more to your liking?”
As if heeding her words, the animal, a full-grown male, ten or twelve hands high, lowered its head and snapped off a marigold. When the sounds of mastication, the crunching of orange petals, was replaced by the clunk of a single swallow, she extended her hand. The animal blinked but made no attempt to leave as she drew her fingers through the thick, short hairs of the taut hip, hairs like those she had scraped from a skin outside her parents’ tipi. It was that muscle, rock-hard, almost devoid of fat, that enabled the almost effortless bounding across fields and flight over low fences. It had been years since she’d had a venison steak.
The buck stomped a front hoof, snorted, then gracefully (perhaps he’d sensed the old woman’s gustatory fantasies), without haste, raised one slender leg after another. At the underbrush he ducked his head and disappeared from Elinor’s view.
Leaves crunched, twigs cracked. Then silence.
Drowsily, Elinor brought the cigarette to her lips and sucked hard on the cooling ember. The cigarette glowed red, the paper curled and shrank into itself. The thin smoke tasted the musky trail of the animal.
Humans named them rubbing stones. We bison had no name for them.
But we cherished those rusty-grey boulders stranded on the prairie. So soothing. To rub my hip, or scratch my head on a craggy point, or drag the entirety of my body over the unflinching hardness. Many springs I shed my winter coat at the base of a rubbing stone.
The Indian woman barely spoke last time she was here. Nor did she draw. She sat in her chair and rocked. Some of the time she sang. I was reminded of the cows at those times.
The sound they made when their calves had been lost or taken.
Their crying began with the first light of day and continued until long after the moon had risen.
A sound like no other, it spread through the herd and over the prairie like a fog. Thick, impossible to escape, the sound touched every stone, spear of grass, creature with ears.
The wailing of the cows told the land and the sky that their calves were not returning.
Not ever.
9
Stroking her fingers over the dryness of the thin brown envelope, Elinor watched the white-edged ripples on the water; the wind was up. Louise had called a few hours ago. She was full of questions, most of which Elinor did not know how to answer. No, she did not remember the names of the teachers. She didn’t know if there had been a doctor at the birth. Finally, she’d shouted at Louise that more than seventy years had gone by. Some days she didn’t remember her own name. She heard the impatience in her daughter’s voice. Louise was used to getting information out of people, but the two of them were not in a courtroom.
She should never have let that nun take the child. What was she thinking? She had let her first child be taken by the same people who had been stealing Indian children for years, making parents bring them to those schools. Or arriving on their doorsteps to drag them away. No discussion about this with the chiefs or elders. It was the law of the land. The white man’s law, not Indian law.
She’d never forget the words the nun said to her. I’ll wash her up, make her nice and clean, and be back in a few minutes. She had patted Elinor’s left shoulder. You rest. You’ve had a long labour.
Elinor grunted. Her real labour, her lifelong pain, started the moment she let the nun take her baby.
Elinor squeezed her left shoulder, pulled down her nightgown to have a look. There was never anything to be seen. At least nothing that another person would see, but she always saw it. The imprint of a hand … his hand. She’d always had problems with that shoulder. It ached and ached. Some years were better than others, but it never seemed as strong as her right shoulder.
She did rest after the nun left with her child; she fell asleep for hours. She shouldn’t have done that, but the labour had been long and hard. She was tired and weak. She’d called and called for her mother, but she never came. Elinor had wanted to go outside, to walk in the garden, through the trees, but they kept her in that room, in that bed. It was not the way she’d seen her mother give birth to her babies. No one took her mother’s babies away after they were born; she kept them tied to her body; they went everywhere she went.
Elinor slipped the photograph from the envelope, drew her finger around the head, over the plump cheeks. How could she not have told Joseph about her? Such a kind, gentle man. He would have told her to find her, bring her home. So many times she had promised herself she would tell him. After the first snowfall. When the wild strawberries came into bloom. The next full moon. The next time a hawk flew over the camp. But she never did.
And then to have Louise run away. She thought her heart would break open. When Louise left she was the same age Elinor had been when she birthed Bright Eyes. For weeks Elinor had lived in fear that the same would happen to Louise. Some white man would have his way with her. Or worse, she’d get herself killed. Settlers were flooding into the west from England, Scotland, Germany, and other countries she’d never heard of. They were filling up the land with farms and stores and churches. After the Great War, white people had money. Indians had hardly enough to buy food.
She kissed the photograph and returned it to the envelope.
The house shook with a gust of wind, and then slivers of rain were sliding down the windows.
She wiped the tears from her eyes. And what would Louise say about this? Why was she worrying about that? Her own mother would not have been worrying about what Elinor might think about her. It used to be that the younger looked after the older, cooked and cleaned for them, listened to the stories, respected what they knew. But so many of those ways had changed, g
one the way of the bison. So many of their people were drinking, beating on their wives. Young mothers were feeding their babies from bottles instead of their breasts. How could some formula concocted in a factory be as good for a baby as a mother’s milk? All her babies had sucked from her breasts.
One thing had not changed: her yearning to find her first-born daughter. That had not diminished. It remained as large as that bison in the museum. Neither had her love for Louise changed, even though it was easy for them to bicker and disagree. It was because they were so alike. Both strong-headed. Long before Louise had run from the reserve, she, Elinor, had run from that school. So many times had she done that. Others stayed on, living in fear or letting their heads get filled up with all the white people’s ideas, but she had always resisted. Even when others were getting strapped or their mouths bound for speaking in their own languages, she continued to speak nêhiyawêwin. She’d whisper the words into her pillow; sing the songs beneath her breath in the outhouse, in the garden, when she was hanging the clothes on the line.
Never did she let go of her language.
10
Louise rubbed her hands briskly together in an effort to ward off the chill of her mother’s cottage. She wondered if her mother’s hands, bent and thin, clasped in her lap, were also cold.
Elinor, slumped in her rocker, a blanket bundled around her, wore thick socks that rose halfway up her calves. Maybe it was time, Louise thought. Maybe Alice was right. Her mother should be in town, closer to doctors, in a place that was warmer than this shell of a house. A few months ago when Louise had driven out on a whim, her mother wasn’t in her cottage. Louise, thinking she’d gone to the water, expecting her to appear out of the bushes, had waited on the porch. Eventually, Elinor came around the side of the house. Louise didn’t ask; she knew her mother had come from the outhouse. When she reminded Elinor that she had indoor plumbing, her mother said she found the little building a comfort.
Tears in the Grass Page 6